‘Oh no,’ I said, standing outside the door of what would be my bedroom for the next nine months, and slightly dying inside.

‘What?’ asked Dad, dropping one of my bags on to the floor and pulling his glasses down from the top of his head.

‘Oh, well,’ said Mum, ‘you knew there was a chance of this happening, darling.’

On the front of my bedroom door was my photo and underneath it was written ‘Georgia Warr’ in Times New Roman. Next to that was another photo – of a girl with long brown hair, a smile that looked positively candid in its naturalness, and perfectly threaded eyebrows. Underneath that was the name ‘Rooney Bach’.

Durham was an old English university that had a ‘college system’. Instead of halls of residence, the university was made up of ‘colleges’ spread around the city. Your college was where you slept, showered and ate, but it was also a place you showed your allegiance to through college events, your college sports teams, and running for the college’s executive student roles.

St John’s College – the one that I had been accepted into – was an old building. And because of that, a few of the students living there had to share rooms.

I just hadn’t thought it would be me.

A wave of panic flooded through me. I couldn’t have a roommate – hardly anyone in the UK had roommates at uni. I needed my own space. How was I supposed to sleep or read fanfic or get dressed or do anything with someone else in the room? How was I supposed to relax when I had to socialise with another person every moment I was awake?

Mum didn’t even seem to notice I was panicking. She just said, ‘Well, let’s get cracking, then,’ and opened the door for me.

And Rooney Bach was already there, wearing leggings and a polo shirt, watering a five-foot fern.

The first thing Rooney Bach said to me was, ‘Oh my God, are you Georgia Warr?’ like I was a celebrity, but she didn’t even wait for affirmation before casting her watering can aside, grabbing a large strip of aqua-blue fabric – which I determined to be a rug – from her bed, and holding it up to me.

‘Rug,’ she said. ‘Thoughts?’

‘Um,’ I said. ‘It’s great.’

‘OK, amazing.’ She whooshed the rug into the air and then laid it down in the centre of our room. ‘There. It just needed that splash of colour.’

I think I was in shock a little bit, because only then did I take a proper look around our room. It was large, but pretty gross, as I’d expected it would be – bedrooms are never nice at old English universities. The carpet was a mouldy grey-blue, the furniture was beige and plastic-looking, and our beds were singles. Rooney’s already had bright, flowery bedsheets on it. Mine looked like it belonged in a hospital.

The only nice part of the room was a large sash window. The paint on the wooden frame was peeling and I knew it’d be draughty, but it was sort of lovely, and you could see all the way down to the river.

‘You’ve done up the place nicely already!’ Dad was saying to Rooney.

‘Oh, d’you think so?’ said Rooney. She immediately started narrating a tour of her side of the room to Mum and Dad, showing off all the key features – her illustrated print of some meadows (she liked going on country walks) and one of Much Ado About Nothing (her favourite Shakespeare play), her fleece duvet topper (also aqua, to match the rug), her house plant (whose name was – I hadn’t misheard – Roderick), an aqua desk lamp (from John Lewis) and, most importantly, a giant poster that simply read ‘Don’t Quit Your Daydream’ in a swirly font.

The whole time, she was smiling. Her hair, up in a ponytail, swished around, as my parents tried to keep up with how fast she was talking.

I sat down on my bed in the grey half of the room. I hadn’t brought any posters with me. All I’d brought were a few printed-out photos of me, Pip and Jason.

Mum looked at me from the other side of the room and gave me a sad smile, like she knew that I wanted to go home.

‘You can message us any time, darling,’ said Mum, as we were saying goodbye outside the college. I felt empty and lost, standing there in the cobbled street in the October cold, my parents about to leave me.

I don’t want you to go, was what I wanted to say to them.

‘And Pip and Jason are just down the road, aren’t they?’ continued Dad. ‘You can go and hang out with them any time.’ Pip and Jason had been placed in a different college – University College, or ‘Castle’ as it was commonly referred to by the students here, since it literally was part of Durham Castle. They’d stopped replying to my messages a couple of hours ago. Probably busy unpacking.

Please don’t leave me here alone, I wanted to say.

‘Yeah,’ is what I said.

I glanced around. This was my home, now. Durham. It was like a town out of a Dickens adaptation. All of the buildings were tall and old. Everything seemed to be made of lumps of stone. I could see myself walking down the cobbles and into the cathedral in my graduation gown already. This was where I was supposed to be.

They both hugged me. I didn’t cry, even though I really, really wanted to.

‘This is the start of a big adventure,’ said Dad.

‘Maybe,’ I mumbled into his jacket.

I couldn’t bear to stay and watch them walk away down the road towards the car – when they turned to go, so did I.

Back in my room, Rooney was Blu Tack-ing a photo to the wall, right in the centre of her posters. In the photo was Rooney, maybe aged thirteen or fourteen, with a girl who had dyed red hair. Like, Ariel from The Little Mermaid hair.

‘Is that your friend from home?’ I asked. This was a good conversation starter, at least.

Rooney whipped her head round to look at me, and for a moment I thought I saw an odd expression cross her face. But then it was gone, replaced by her wide smile.

‘Yeah!’ she said. ‘Beth. She’s – she’s not here, obviously, but … yeah. She’s my friend. Do you know anyone else in Durham? Or are you here all alone?’

‘Oh, erm, well, my two best friends are here, but they’re in Castle.’

‘Oh, that’s so nice! Sad you didn’t get into the same college, though.’

I shrugged. Durham took your choice of college into consideration, but not everyone could get their first choice. I’d tried to get into Castle too, but I’d ended up here. ‘We tried, but, yeah.’

‘You’ll be OK.’ Rooney beamed. ‘We’ll be friends.’

Rooney offered to help me unpack, but I declined, determined to at least do this one thing by myself. While I was unpacking, she sat on her bed and chatted to me, and we learnt that we were both studying English. She then declared that she’d done none of the summer reading. I’d done all of it but didn’t mention that.

Rooney, I was quickly learning, was extremely chatty, but I could tell that she was putting on some sort of happy, bubbly persona. Which was fair enough – I mean, it was our first day of university. Everyone was going to be trying really hard to make friends. But I couldn’t get a sense of what sort of person she really was, which was mildly concerning because we were going to be living with each other for almost a full year.

Were we going to be best friends? Or were we going to awkwardly put up with each other before leaving for the summer and never speaking again?

‘So …’ I scanned the room in search of something to talk about, before landing on her Much Ado poster. ‘You like Shakespeare?’

Rooney’s head snapped up from her phone. ‘Yeah! Do you?’

I nodded. ‘Um, yeah, well, I was in a youth theatre group back home. And I did a lot of the school plays. Shakespeare was always my favourite.’

This actually caused Rooney to sit up, eyes wide and sparkling. ‘Wait. You act?’

‘Um …’

I did act, but, well, it was a bit more complicated than that now.

When I was in my early teens, I’d wanted to be an actor – which was why I’d joined the youth theatre group that Pip already went to and started auditioning for the school plays with her. And I was good at it. I got top marks in drama class at school. I usually got a pretty solid speaking part in the plays and musicals that I did.

But as I got older, acting just started to make me nervous. I got more stage fright the more plays I did, and eventually, when I auditioned for Les Misérables in Year 13, I was shaking so much that I got relegated to a role with only one line, and even then, come showtime, I threw up before every single performance.

So maybe a career in acting wasn’t for me.

Despite this, I was planning to continue with acting at uni. I still enjoyed figuring out roles and interpreting scripts – it was the audiences I had problems with. I just needed to work on my confidence. I’d join the student theatre society and maybe audition for a play. I needed to join one society, at least, if I was going to branch out and open up and meet new people.

And find someone to fall in love with.

‘Yeah, a bit,’ I said.

‘Oh. My. God.’ Rooney clapped one hand to her heart. ‘This is amazing. We can go join the DST together.’

‘The DST …?’

‘Durham Student Theatre. They basically run all of the drama societies in Durham.’ Rooney flipped her ponytail back. ‘The Shakespeare Soc is literally the main society I wanna join. I know most freshers do the Freshers Play but I had a look at what plays they’ve done the past few years and they’re all kind of boring? So I’m at least gonna try and join Shakespeare. God I’m praying they’ll do a tragedy. Macbeth is literally my dream …’

Rooney rambled on without seeming to care whether I was actually listening or not.

We had something in common. Acting. This was good.

Maybe Rooney would be my first new friend.